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The 28-point US plan has been criticised as being pro-Russian
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that a 28-point plan presented by President Donald Trump is a “basis for future agreements”, while delivering a speech in Kyrgyzstan on Thursday.
The proposed agreement has been criticised as being pro-Russian, with Europe demanding amendments in a counter-offer agreed in Geneva.
It comes as Trump’s son defended his father’s envoy Steve Witkoff over leaked conversations where he appears to coach Russian officials on how to handle the US president.
The leak of the call to Bloomberg News has not gone down well in Russia, with the Kremlin calling it “unacceptable” and “clearly aimed” at hindering the peace talks.
The White House has not disputed the leaked transcript, and Donald Trump Jr defended Witkoff’s methods as “classic negotiation techniques to butter up his counterpart”.
“It’s almost like these media and deep state morons have never successfully negotiated a deal in the real world. It’s pretty obvious that nearly all of Witkoff’s critics want any sort of Ukraine peace deal to fail so they can continue this war endlessly,” he said in a post.
Russia has gained around 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory since it invaded in February 2022.
Ukraine continues to suffer the swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune at the hands of American negotiators but is learning how to survive the whirligig of the White House.
Donald Trump and his envoys are neither honest brokers nor even allies of Kyiv’s fight to defend itself against Russian invaders. But, for a little while, it seems that Ukraine has managed to swing them away from being outright enemies.
The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley reports:
A call between US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov could have been leaked by a foreign intelligence agency targeting the Russian official’s phone, a senior US official has said.
The senior official in the Trump administration said the target in the leaked call was not Witkoff but Ushakov, reported the Wall Street Journal today.
It added that Putin’s close aide has also been recorded in a second conversation with another Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
Dozens of countries around the world have the technology to listen to Ushakov’s conversations as he used an open cellphone line, a European security official said.
He also suspects a European country was likely behind it, but could not point out who exactly.
As a Ukraine-Russia peace proposal is debated, forces in Finland rehearse guerrilla warfare against a potential Russian offensive that many expect to happen in the near future.
A court in Russia on Thursday convicted eight people on terrorism charges over an attack on a bridge linking Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea that is a key supply route for Kremlin forces in the war with Ukraine.
The court sentenced all of the defendants to life in prison.
The October 2022 attack on the bridge came when a truck bomb blew up two of its sections and required months of repairs. The blast killed the truck driver and four other people in a car nearby. Moscow decried the attack as an act of terrorism and retaliated by bombarding Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, targeting the country’s power grid over the winter.
A man accused of the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline will be extradited to Germany on Thursday after Italy approved the decision last week, German prosecutors revealed on Thursday.
The man, identified only as Serhii K, denies any role in the attacks and his lawyer, Nicola Canestrini, said she is confident he will be acquitted.
A victory for Russia is “not inevitable” according to new data analysed by the Institute for the Study of War.
Using information on the rate of advance of Russian forces, the ISW said: “The reality on the battlefield indicates that a Russian victory in Ukraine is far from certain.”
The report added: “Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian military commanders have been attempting to portray Russia as capable of rapidly seizing Donetsk Oblast militarily, but hard data on the rate of Russian advance in Donetsk Oblast does not indicate that Russian forces will imminently seize the rest of the oblast.”
Contrary to Russian reports from the frontline, it said that “rapid Russian seizure of the rest of Donetsk Oblast is not imminent”.
Ukraine and US negotiating teams will be meeting soon, foreign minister Andrii Sybiha told a news briefing on Thursday.
“Our expectations are concrete results. Concrete results so that progress can be made,” she said.
“It is extremely important for us, and Ukraine has demonstrated this repeatedly, to achieve a truce.”
Hungary’s government has backed a US-brokered peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, according to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas.
Gulyas told a briefing that a peace deal should be reached as soon as possible. Asked about reports that Orban would be going to Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin, he added he “could not confirm or deny anything”.
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